Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

But I was starved for recreation, and had to get it the best way I could, even if I had no money to pay for it.

There was a rooftop motion picture theater nearby at that time called Japanese Gardens (most likely because its overhead aisle-lights were encased in a few pseudo-Japanese lanterns; there was never anything else Japanese that I could notice about it). It was not an open-air theater, but simply a roofed over one on the top floor of the building. The great advantage of the place was this: If you bought an admission and entered legitimately, so to speak, which I could not do because I couldn’t afford the twenty-five cents, you were carried from the street-level lobby by elevator up to the theater itself. But in compliance with fire department regulations there was an enclosed safety-staircase that ran down from above and gave onto the street by means of a heavy metal door, which could not be opened from the outside, but could easily be pushed aside from the inside. The elevator was slow in coming up, and very often people who had finished seeing the show and wanted to leave were too impatient to wait for it and would come down the stairs instead. I used to hang around the outside of this staircase door and watch it like a hawk, and when I saw it start to swing open, I’d hook my hand to it and keep it akimbo until I could get in myself. Those leaving never offered any objection; they seemed tolerant that way. I didn’t mind climbing up the five or six flights. It meant nothing to me; I considered it well worthwhile. They changed the bill twice a week, and for several weeks I took in each new show and managed to see a fair sampling of the best feature pictures of the early thirties.

But one night, careless from long immunity, I timed myself wrong, and the usher on duty must have spotted me without my knowing it, as I crossed the vulnerable open space between the stairhead and the last row of seats. He waited until I’d picked out a nice comfortable aisle seat, then I felt a rock-hard tap on my shoulder, and when I looked up, he grimly and wordlessly swung his thumb back and forth a few times toward the staircase.

He didn’t actually take hold of my arm, but he insisted on escorting me all the way down the stairs again to where I had originally entered. The sound of his slapping footsteps counterpointing mine down five or six whole flights irritated me for some reason.

“All right,” I protested, offended. “I’m going. You don’t have to come all the way down to the bottom with me.”

He came back at me with a catch-phrase popular at the time: “You’re telling me you’re going? No, I’m telling you.”

When we were both on the outside, he securely reclosed the front door from that side and then he himself reentered by the front way, in order to be able to ride the elevator up, leaving me standing by myself on the dismal sidewalk, heaving and as cracklingly indignant as though I had been unjustly put upon.

And this was the way things had been going with me right then. It was, as I said at the beginning, no time in which to be a writer.

But I knew I had to be. It was something I couldn’t help being. It was something that had been in me all my life, from the time that I was a kid and first kept a schoolboyish diary. It was something that I couldn’t push aside until later, when I would know the real meaning of unhappiness, not these little trials and tribulations I knew now. I used to round my fist, and swing it with all my might into my other palm, whenever I received a disappointment or a rejection, and mutter doggedly: “I’ll beat this game yeti I’ll beat it yeti”

I thought about it, and thought about it, and finally I came to a decision. There was one solution and only one. There was one way to make enough money all at one time to tide me over, take the curse off this hand-to-mouth existence I was leading, give me a start back onto my feet at least. Books wouldn’t do it, they weren’t selling. Magazines wouldn’t do it, they weren’t buying.

But there was one medium of profit left. The motion-picture industry. Although its earnings, too, had gone down greatly, it was so worldwide, so universal, had become such a standby of modern-day living, that it alone managed to keep its head well above the general inundation. Many a man without work or hope of work (or after a while even the desire for it) managed somehow to find a stray quarter and go into some small moviehouse at noon when it opened, and spend the rest of the day in there trying to forget that he had no work or hope of work. Smoking, eating a stale roll, watching the anesthetic up on the screen.

The motion-picture industry still bought from writers. It needed them, it fed upon them, they were its fodder. And when it bought, it still paid, not by the hundreds of dollars but by the thousands.

The problem, though, was to offer them something that stood a good chance of acceptance, that was likely to be bought. To come up with anything else would be just a waste of time. All the things I had on hand, already done, were as stale as the speakeasies and the knee-length skirts; I knew no one would touch them.

Then when I least expected it I came across, quite by accident, something that seemed to have just the right possibilities. Opening my valise one day to scramble through it for something (it always made me wistful to bring it out into the open and see the travel-and hotel-stickers still all over it — “Red Star Line,” “Holland-America Line,” “Hotel Colon, Barcelona,” “Pension Isabella, Muenchen” — from the carefree days now gone), I upturned the first few pages of a novel I had started in Paris two years before and never gone ahead with.

It was called I Love You, Paris, a title which would have been invalidated a couple of decades later by the hit song from Can Can. There was very little of it done, just an opening chapter, but I found when I reread it that what I had intended to do with it was still fresh enough in my mind, and in any case there was a key-sheet along with it, with a skeleton plot-framework outlined on it.

My volatile optimism (at least where my own material was concerned) immediately blazed up on reading it over, and it seemed to me to be the very thing I was looking for, the best possible bet for what I had in mind. For one thing, the period I had picked for it — pre-war Paris, 1912 — was still completely untouched as far as the pictures were concerned, and I felt that should make a very good selling point. The screen was known to be always on the lookout for new, unhackneyed settings for its stories.

My protagonists were a pair of professional ballroom dancers, the man much older than the girl, his pupil and protégée, one of a long succession he has had throughout his career, whom he has taught to dance, made famous, and who then have repaid him by leaving him for some other, younger man. He is in love with his current partner, but she looks upon him only as a father and mentor.

Along comes a younger man the girl’s own age, and he and she fall in love. Then the young people have a misunderstanding and fall out again. She disappears, and he goes looking for her everywhere and cannot find her. Then, on her opening night, the night of her professional debut, he happens to pass the place where she is to appear and recognizes her from a photograph in the foyer. He goes in to watch her, thinking this will be the last time he will ever see her.

She has an enormous and dazzling success, and instantly becomes the sensation of Paris. But she has recognized him sitting out front, and immediately after the performance she runs out to him, throws her success over her shoulder, and they go off together.

Her partner, who has really got a bad deal out of the whole thing, accepts it with graceful resignation (he is used to it by now) and goes back to his former partner, who has been intermittently sending off sparks of jealousy in the background throughout the story. The implication is that they will continue to bicker like cat and dog, as they did the first time, but at least will understand each other.